was not hers, with a look of wild enquiry in her eye. When I spoke to her she jerked her head back on its wattled neck like a startled hen. She came home that evening. They brought her in an ambulance, which impressed her, I could see, for all her distractedness; she descended from the wide-flung back doors with an almost queenly step, laying a hand imperiously on my offered arm.
It was strange, the silent clamour of her presence in the house. I felt like an attendant set to watch over a large, dangerous machine that had seized up and that no one knew how to set going again. It was always there, under everything, the sense of her, all that stalled potential, the house hummed with it. Inside her somewhere the dynamo was still spinning; where did the energy go to, what invisible elaborations was it generating? She unnerved me. She seemed no longer human, she seemed something more than that, ancient and elemental. I tended her like a priest at a shrine, with weary reverence, resignedly, stooping under that silent stare, that mute mixture of pleading and disdain. She took to pushing things off the bedside table, pill boxes, the night-light holder, the glass for her false teeth; she even developed a knack of overturning her chamber pot. Word of her condition got round among the lodgers, and soon the commercial travellers stopped coming and the clerks and secretaries found digs elsewhere. Now the deserted house became her shell, her sounding-box. Despite the ruin of her mind I credited her with uncanny powers of perception. I fancied I could hear her breathing wherever I was in the house, even down in the back scullery, where I brewed her tea and mashed the slops for her that were all she could manage now. She seemed never to sleep. I would look into her room and there she would be, no matter how late the hour, sprawled in the foul roost of her bed, propped up crookedly in the corner against a bank of pillows, in the tallowy glow of the night light, an elbow wedged against the wall, grey hair a fright and her jaw set and the little hard blue teary eyes fixed on me furiously, brimming with all that was pent in her, the years. Despite myself, I would step inside, and shut the door, and the flame of the night light would waver and the room would lurch and immediately right itself again. Sometimes I would talk to her, not knowing if she could hear me, or if she did, that she could understand what I was saying. I was prey to an oppressive self-awareness. Listening shadows hung in the high room. The tall black wardrobe had a curved front, more like a lid than a door, and always reminded me of a sarcophagus. She would stir, or rather, something would stir in her, one of those interior tremors, barely detectable, that I had learned to interpret, I do not know how, and I would sigh, and lift the teacup and cracked jug that stood with her rosary beads and prayer book on the bedside table, and pour out a draught of water, marvelling vaguely at the undulant rope of liquid coiling into the cup, gold-coloured in the candlelight. I would sit down beside her on one haunch on the side of the bed, the bed in which I had been born—had been got, too, most likely—and put an arm around her shoulders and draw her forward and look on as she drank, her puckered, whiskery lips mumbling the rim of the cup, and feel the water going down her gullet in hiccupy swallows. Then I would see myself here as a child, kneeling on the floor in the rain-light of a winter afternoon, lost in my solitary games, my mother lolling in bed with her magazines and her chocs, and the wireless whispering and the rain tapping on the windowpanes, and now I would shake her a little, not roughly, feeling the bones of her shoulders shift inside their parcel of loose flesh, and at last, surrendering, she would lay her raddled old head against my shoulder and exhale a long, slow, whistling sigh. Look at us there, a deposition scene in reverse, the dying hunched old woman cradled in the arm of her living son, in our dome of candlelight, lapped in our noisome, ancient warmth.
Presently she died. It was, as they say in these parts, a great release.
It is late, the light is going. My mind aches from so much futile remembering. What does it signify, this chapter of family accidents? What is it I hope to retrieve? What is it I am trying to avoid? I see what was my life adrift behind me, going smaller and smaller with distance, like a city on an ice floe caught in a current, its twinkling lights, its palaces and spires and slums, all miraculously intact, all hopelessly beyond reach. Was it I who took an axe to the ice? What can I do now but stand on this crumbling promontory and watch the past as it dwindles? When I look ahead, I see nothing except empty morning, and no day, only dusk thickening into night, and, far off, something that is not to be made out, something vague, patient, biding. Is that the future, trying to speak to me here, among these shadows of the past? I do not want to hear what it might have to say.
2
There is pandemonium among the seagulls, great events seem to be taking place. Before my arrival a flock of them had come in from the sea and settled on the house, building their nests in the chimneys and the valley of the roof. Why they chose this spot I do not know; perhaps they liked the calm and quiet of our little square. They are anything but calm themselves. From earliest morning the sky is filled with their tumult. They clamour and shriek and make an angry rattling with beaks agape. Their favourite noise, however, is a staccato yacking, like a hyena’s laugh or baboon’s hoot, that decelerates gradually while simultaneously rising in pitch. Even at night they are restless, I hear them flopping about on the roof, grumbling and threatening each other. At dawn every day they set up a deafening racket. Why such uproar? Surely the mating season is well over—certainly there are young already being taught to fly, ugly, awkward, dun-coloured things that waddle to the edge of the roof and perch there, peering down at the drop and swallowing hard, or looking all about with a show of unconcern, before launching themselves out shakily on to the air currents. At certain times their elders all together will take to the sky and wheel and wheel in majestic slow circles above the house, screaming, whether in panic or wild exultation it is impossible to know.
Yesterday I looked up from where I was sitting and saw one of the adults standing outside on the window sill. I am always startled by the great size of these birds when seen up close. They are so menacingly graceful in flight, yet when they land they become sadly comical, perched on their spindly legs and ridiculous flat feet, like the botched prototype of some far more handsome, far more well-fashioned species. This one just stood there beyond the glass, doing nothing except opening wide its beak in what seemed a yawn or a soundless cry. Curious, I put down my book and went outside. The bird did not fly away at my approach, but held its place, shifting ponderously from foot to foot and regarding me with wary deprecation out of one large, pale, lustrous eye. I saw at once what the matter was: on the ground below the window sill a dead fledgeling lay. It must have fallen from the roof, or failed in flight and plummeted to earth and broken its neck. Its look was glazed already, its plumage dulled. The parent, for I have no doubt that is what it was, made its beak gape again in that odd way, with no sound. It might have been a threat, to warn me off, but I am inclined to believe it was a sign of distress. Even seagulls must have expressions of sorrow or of joy recognisable at least to their fellows. Probably they see our visages as just as blank and inexpressive as theirs seem to us. A man numb with inexplicable misery, for instance, I am sure to them would be merely another dead-eyed dullard gazing pitilessly upon a scene of incommensurable loss. The bird was male, I think; I think, yes, a father.
I left it to its silent vigil and, prompted somehow by the encounter, made my way down to the sea. I have hardly left the house since coming here, and I went forth almost fearfully, casting an anxious backward look about my little world, like a medieval explorer about to take ship for Cathay. The trek took a good half-hour. I went by what I thought would be a short cut across the fields, and got lost. At last, sweating and shaken, I came out through a hazel wood on to a shingly strip of beach. The usual mingled iodine and cat-piss smell was very strong. Is there anywhere more evocative than these tawny fringes of our dry-land world? At the first crunching footstep I might have been walking these sands all my life, despite the surly and unwelcoming aspect of the spot, that would have been fitted more to brigandage than bathing. The dunes were low, and there was no grass, only a tough, thorny stuff that crackled underfoot. The beach was steeply shelved, and in places the top layer of sand had blown away, exposing striated ridges of a scaly, shale-like stuff that would cut the soles of any swimmer foolhardy enough to venture barefoot over it.
I wonder if my ghosts would have known I was not in the house. Do they appear when I am not present? Is a rose red in the dark—who said that?
Not a soul was to be seen on the shore, except, a little way out, a very large black seabird standing motionless on a black rock. It had a long slender neck and a slender body, and seemed unreal in its stillness, more an artist’s stylisation than a living bird. I sat down on one of the exposed ridges of shale. Curious stuff it was, like crumbly stone, and greasy to the touch. The morning was still, under a seamless white sky. There was a full tide, and the surface of the water, taut and burnished like billowing silk, seemed higher than the land, and on the point of spilling over. The waves were hardly waves at all, more a wrinkle running along the edges of a sluggishly swaying vast bowl of water. Why do I find the thought of the sea so alarming? We speak of its power and violence as if it
